


A: Growing Older

by viceversa



Series: Soulmates A-Z [1]
Category: NCIS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, mention of past torture / sexual assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:55:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29270625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viceversa/pseuds/viceversa
Summary: Gibbs never thought he deserved a second chance at love. Jack never got her first.-a...ging stops at 18 until you find your soulmate so the two of you can grow old together.
Relationships: Jethro Gibbs/Jacqueline "Jack" Sloane
Series: Soulmates A-Z [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2149590
Comments: 12
Kudos: 62





	A: Growing Older

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to the first in a new slibbs series that's all about soulmates! dlodle0 and I will be posting the whole alphabet of prompts, so subscribe to the series for more!

It was rare to get a second chance at love, sure, but not unheard of. By the time Gibbs noticed that he wasn’t aging anymore, he felt angry. Shannon was his _soulmate_ \- his whole life. He had seen what losing his mother had done to his father and expected to feel the same hollowness for the rest of his days. He never stopped aging in the first place since he and Shannon had met so young, but now he was stuck forever 37.

One would think Gibbs would have gained all the rest of his years at once, losing a soulmate so soon and so tragically, but instead he got another shot at a lifetime with someone. He really didn’t know what to feel about it beyond not believing it possible. 

Of course he couldn’t reject his soul-bond, he just had to live life normally while hoping no one noticed he looked good for his supposed age. At least he looked like an adult - some of his colleagues that were technically older than him still looked like kids, stuck at 18. Ducky, one of his oldest friends who had a decade on him, was still charmingly a teen, wise as he was. 

It made it easy to slip into undercover operations, only five years into his NIS career. Strangers paid attention to people who looked like 18-year-olds, hoping they were the answer to their dreams. No one looked twice at someone who was in his thirties. 

It also made it easier to find other people to be romantically involved with - other people who have lost their soulmate or who found out that their soulmate wasn’t for life, after all. If anything, he felt sorry for his next wives who all experienced some degree of heartbreak before even meeting Gibbs, and he didn’t exactly make it easy on them. 

As the years passed, those closest to him knew that he was one of the lucky few who got another chance. His dark gray hair never got any lighter, his face never wrinkled further, and he was still keeping up with field agents half his age when he should’ve been in his late fifties and close to retirement. 

Instead, he watched as his team found their soulmates one by one. It was a trick of the system that there was no electrifying moment to signal _this is the one_. Change was subtle - you meet your soulmate and you start aging at a normal rate. Some people reported feeling different after meeting someone, but it wasn’t the norm.

Tony and Ziva, an unlikely pair that had to grow into their bond. McGee and Delilah hit it off instantly, the same with Palmer and Breena. Hell, he even witnessed Diane find her soulmate in Fornell, of all people, as rocky as that relationship went. People came and went, dictated by love or tragedy or random happenstance. 

Some people never realized they met their mate and were unable to track them down once they realized they were aging. Abby held out hope that her soulmate would reappear someday because of that. The internet was full of lost connections, of people trying to match up times and places, not knowing if eye contact with a stranger on the street was all that it took. 

When Gibbs was young, he never worried about meeting his soulmate. Some people were anxious to never meet anyone, to continue living as long as possible. Others were anxious to meet the person that presumably completed them so they could live a full life. 

His childhood was surrounded with stories of this supposed true love, but he knew someplace deep down that there was no control over it. You either met your person or you didn’t; they were in your life or they weren’t. They were in your life forever, or they left willingly or not. There were no promises of immortality in his line of work, which was dangerous on that front and also by virtue of meeting dozens of strangers every week. Any one of them could trigger that evolutionary glitch to start the forward march of aging, and he wouldn’t know. 

After thirty years without Shannon, without Kelly, he didn’t really care. He put everything into his work, thankful for his relatively young body. He fully expected to go out in a firefight, heroic in death, body still 37 as a symbol of the exact second he’d lost his family.

Which made it surprising as hell when, one day, he woke up and noticed a white patch in his hair.

-

Jacqueline Sloane didn’t have the best college experience. It was a cliched societal expectation that kids went to college and had the best years of their life, which included partying and meeting one’s soulmate. And while Jack did have a good time, and actually did meet her soulmate, the bad generally outweighed the good. 

When she looked back at college, she remembered finding her path in life and meeting her best friends for a time. She considered herself lucky to have the experience at all, even if it was cut short in a way she never imagined. One of those best friends attacked her at a party, which resulted in a child she gave a better life to, which then prompted her to join the Army. 

Such is life. 

But a few years into her service, when she realized her body was no longer 18 years old, there was a pang of regret in her gut. To have found a soulmate and lost them without ever meeting, it was a fluke of the system, and she wondered who they were - and if she would have realized it had she stayed in college instead of running away. 

But Jack never felt the tragedy of missing out on her soulmate. The Army was her life, and she committed herself fully to it without any ties back home. Her determination helped her succeed, completing her degrees and joining PsyOps. 

The rest was history. In Afghanistan, she hoped that her soulmate, whoever it was, would move on and find happiness. After Afghanistan, she could care less that someone was out there who was supposed to be with her, because she couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be around her. 

Years passed as she recovered, mentally and physically, when one day she had a strange thought as she looked at herself in the mirror: 

She was supposed to be in her late forties, but she didn’t look much older than the average woman in her mid thirties. 

The thought haunted her until she saw a doctor who confirmed it. Whoever her soulmate had been in college was likely dead, and instead of continuing to age like most people did she stopped again. 

The medical community classified it as a Phase 2 Soul Bond - a bond that occurs after the first, usually with someone else who also was in Phase 2. The people were linked somehow, by their mutual tragedy of losing their first mate or by life experience. It only happened to a small percentage of those who lost their first mate, but the percentage of those in that category who did meet their second soulmate was high. 

Jack suddenly had another chance, and she had no idea how to feel about it. 

Every day in California, she worked with teams as a forensic psychologist, helping to track down criminals and profile suspects. She met new people all the time, but her skin never gained any wrinkles, her joints never aged with time. For over a decade, Jack remained an estimated 35 years old, still able to surf and box at high intensity. 

She’d largely given up any hope in meeting her second soulmate, which is why she took the job in DC when Leon called. Whoever was destined for her obviously wasn’t in California, so she felt that a relocation might change things. Maybe she would find someone on the east coast, maybe she wouldn’t, but life in San Diego had become stagnant. 

She worried that she would be 35 forever until forever became too much for her mind. Those who never met their soulmate often went insane after a few centuries, another fluke in evolution that no one talked about.

Jack did her research before starting her new job, wanting to profile her new colleagues. The decision landed her on the doorstep of Special Agent Gibbs in the middle of a hurricane, wanting to check out the notorious hardass before working with him. What she found was the beginning of a friendship that forced her to open up to him and that built enough trust for him to open up as well. Two people with enough baggage to sink the boat in his basement ten times over made for a strong bond.

Which is why, two years into her new job, she wasn’t entirely surprised when she started noticing a few new wrinkles in her face. 

-

She really should’ve realized what was going on sooner. Soulmates had an aura about them sometimes - you could almost tell when two people were in the same room and had a bond. It was no wonder that his team had picked up on something, had teased her about her “thing” with Gibbs. 

Grace was going to have a field day with this. 

Part of her was worried that maybe it wasn’t him, that maybe she’d seen some other person over the last few years and it had once again unknowingly been her soulmate. But her gut pulled her toward Gibbs, just as strong as she felt she could trust him. 

But there was a problem. Sure, over the last year especially, they’d grown closer. Close enough that Jack was considering making a move just to see where it would go, but every hint she dropped was kicked aside and never spoken of. And then Nick started in with her “thing” with Gibbs, and she saw the wrinkles, and her hopes suddenly, startlingly, became possibilities. 

She nearly confronted him about it, referencing the elephant in the room. She knew she wasn’t making it up when he came back with that damn ugly elephant painting, but the gift served as another way to shut her down without conversation. 

Statistics said that they were more than likely a match. Both had a soulmate young and lost them, both had shared experiences and similar interests. Science and probability would place them together as data points alone, and Jack felt dumb to have taken so long to figure it out. But she didn’t know what to do.

It wasn’t until a few weeks of the elephant hanging in her office that he came to her. A lull in the caseload had driven him and his team restless for days, and she could tell that something was weighing on him. Jack was sure to remind him she was there to talk, and finally he appeared in her office late one evening, long after his team left, exhausted from another day of paperwork and cold cases. 

“Hey Gibbs, what brings you up here?” She motioned him in, noting that he closed the door behind him. 

He paced back and forth for a moment, settling on picking up the darts from her desk and throwing them. Jack watched as he began a perfect game by himself, letting him cycle through a few rounds before she spoke. 

“Any particular reason you feel like throwing things?” 

His shoulders dropped, betraying his response as a lie. “Nope.”

“Gibbs,” she pushed slightly. Maybe this could be the night she said something about the newly forming lines around her eyes, the slight wrinkle on the back of her hands. 

He threw his last dart with force and it bounced off a metal divider, hitting the floor with a tiny thud. He looked at her and then went to the couch, and she could tell he needed the distance by the way he put his head in his hands, rubbing his face. 

Still, she stood from her desk and made her way toward him, sitting not too far away on the coffee table in front of him.

“What’s wrong, Gibbs?” she asked gently.

He sighed into his hands, then raked his fingers through his hair and sat back to look at her. “My hair’s turnin’ white.”

She tried to cover her gasp with a hand, but he heard it anyway. She didn’t know what to say - was it confirmation of what she felt in her gut? “Oh, holy cow… Gibbs that’s significant.” 

“Ya think, Sloane? Gone thirty years not changing a bit, and now it’s happenin’ and…”

“And you have absolutely no idea what to feel,” she finished for him. 

It must have been something in the tone of her voice that tipped him off to their shared experience because he sat up and looked at her critically, flicking his eyes briefly to the elephant portrait behind her. 

“Jack…” he trailed off, letting a moment beat between them. “Somethin’ you wanna say?”

“I um,” she cleared her throat, nervous without reason. If this was them, their future, it would be good. She locked eyes with him, remembering their trust in one another outside of their soul-bond. She could trust him with this. “I’m getting wrinkles around my eyes.”

His eyes flared open but he kept their gaze steady, even as Jack wavered, too tense not to fidget. 

Silent, he reached out a hand to her and she took it, holding on tight and trying not to let tears fall. It was a quiet acknowledgement, an acceptance. 

He tugged slightly and she followed the movement to sit on the couch next to him, their hands still entwined as he turned to face her. 

“Jack,” he said, like her name alone could communicate everything he needed it to. 

But she felt it, then. This bond that other soulmates talk about, the tug in the gut, then trembling in her nerves. There was no question if it was him or not. “Jethro,” she replied.

He kissed her first, naturally. It was chaste and steady, confident against her as she replied with the same pressure. It was a promise. 

They pulled back, hands still tightly wrapped together. “I hoped it was you,” Jack said. She let her eyes fall shut as their foreheads touched. It was a wonder in and of itself, that a simple point of contact could feel like that. 

“Of course it was you,” he replied. 

Suddenly the future felt right, the chance to age alongside her soulmate and have a full life with him a miracle she wouldn’t take for granted. 


End file.
